Monday, 9 December 2019
China's long term strategy
Subject: China's long term strategy.
A companies modus operandi is to make profit. Without profit it won't exist for long so the strategy in the boardrooms and in the manufacturing plant is to become efficient at what they do so they can sell what they make to a public spoilt for choice by the other firms competing for the dollar in their pocket. The above is true even as the company competes with foreign firms who make similar products and have access to your market.
In theory it's a level playing field other than the different sources of capital investment which are needed from time to time to invest in perhaps a modernising strategy, new equipment, or the investment in expensive research and development to keep your firm on a par with those similarly engaged in the market.
But what if your competitor had a stream of cash which fell outside the normal investment criteria, where investment was so long term that the object of making a profit was shelved to provide the tools to destabilise a market by flooding a market with cheap subsidised goods which drive all the competitors out of business. What if the strategy was not to make a profit but to discombobulate a structure which thrives on the balance of competitive competition for one in which is funded by funds drawn from the national exchequer of an enterprise where the funds are the income received through national taxation.
But surely the taxpayers would complain, since one would assume that they should have first call on those funds for use in their own country and not used to destabilise the global economy at large. No electable government could possibly get away with it at the ballot box in the next election, they would be pursued by the opposition and replaced. But what if there is no opposition and what if the electoral system allows only one party, the options for dissent are minimal and the field is open for who ever is in charge to extrapolate this financial opportunity into the far distant future.
If the objectives are political such as when the Americans, after the Second World War used loans and the dollar became the method of exchange across the globe, or before them by the British through trade and Empire. Today's growing power China, in its seemingly unstoppable Chinese expansion into virtually every corner of the globe, buying up expertise and strategic assets, buying up raw materials and the land on which those assets sit is today's coloniser. If this wholesale purchase right across the globe becomes part of the eventual 'seed of destruction of capitalism' by drowning capitalists in the asset they most cherishes, money. Where foresighted people not tainted by cash and jam today and who represent the needs of all of us are attracted back into politics, not for personal gain but the ethical values of service.
Our money corrupted values are but chaff in the wind when seen from the spectra of untold riches today and let tomorrow take care of itself. Climate change is but one example where the curtailment of 'business as usual' is an anathema to large swathes of business. They are not provoked by the needs of our children, "aren't we doing enough for them by sending them to elitist schools", or the concept of worrying about the poor living in the coastal plains around the world who will drown or be driven, from where they live by rising sea levels. Even the problem of the trashed societies we see in many urban centres in the West, largely created by our apparently unstoppable trend of buying consumables from sweatshop industries in Asia, leaving our local industry ruined by the unregulated industries in Bangladesh or Hangzhou in China. The waste lands of Detroit or Luton are a direct result of unrestricted capital flow away from manufacturing and into the casino's of Wall Street and Canary Wharf. This continual 'slight of hand' where we are told the world economy will bring sustainable returns for us all to share so long as we don't look too hard at the why's and wherefores of how it all happens.
No wonder politicians are not trusted as they have their greedy fingers in their own nefarious affairs, be it the scandal of MPs expenses or the direct link between Joe Biden's son, Hunter in a Chinese funded capital scheme of which his dad saw no conflict of interest, to the US President Trumps refusal to hand over his business accounts for perusal by the IRA or our own Prime Minister favouring some attractive American business woman with funds from the City of London's accounts, no doubt to further his insatiable need for feminine company.
Given this gap in old style ethics, given the power of money, given the impossible task of preventing overseas governments investment in private companies and even it seems in the strategic business of national security such as the technical opportunities of the 5G telecommunications network initially promised to a Chinese company Huawei.
Given the scandal that our nuclear powered electricity generating stations can't be funded from our own national purse but can, it seems be funded by China , a country who clearly operates on different principles to our own 'liaise faire' market financed ideology, in essence, a simply bewildering and breathtaking contrast of fundamental ideals which make our decision to use them undoubtably bizarre.
But then that's the world we live in, a bizarre pre dystopian world where the majority have simply become, "chaff to the mill".
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